GPS Units So Faulty, They Showed Fire Trucks in New York Harbor

The Bloomberg administration spent millions of dollars to put custom-made GPS tracking units in fire and garbage trucks, only to have vehicles inexplicably show up on computer screens as if they had sunk to the bottom of Long Island Sound or New York Harbor, the city comptroller has found.

Faulty devices, inaccurate locations, needless features and prices to make a vendor blush — as much as $56,000 for a single unit in a sanitation truck — characterized the two projects, according to two audits released on Wednesday.

The comptroller, John C. Liu, said the findings were more evidence of the administration’s troubled record with computer projects.

“Once again, millions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted on technology that falls short of what’s promised, raising questions about the oversight of expensive outside consultants,” he said in a statement. Mr. Liu, a likely mayoral candidate, has crusaded against city technology spending on projects like CityTime, the scandal-plagued payroll system.

Mr. Liu called the automated vehicle-location projects, developed since 2005, “a classic case of what not to do — build a complex new system when simple, already available consumer-oriented devices could do the job at a fraction of the cost.”

Putting GPS units in fire trucks made no sense, one audit charges, because computer-aided dispatch systems already track the vehicles’ runs from fire stations to emergency calls and back. Ambulances, which roam over wide areas and need to be tracked more closely, also have the new GPS units, which Frank Gribbon, a Fire Department spokesman, said were “already saving lives.”

When they worked correctly, auditors wrote, the fire-truck units provided time-delayed locations, a dubious feature for speeding vehicles. Those units were paid for with $7.3 million under the $2 billion Emergency Communications Transformation Program for city call-taking and dispatch operations.

The units also had a habit of showing the fire trucks back in their stations when they were really on calls, or in the middle of various bodies of water when they were actually in their stations, auditors said. Dispatchers do not yet rely on the tracking units, so no one’s safety was jeopardized.

Mr. Gribbon defended the spending, though he conceded that the technology needed work. “In a post-9/11 world, we want to know where all of our equipment is, all the time,” he said.

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The department said any fire trucks shown in the water had defective GPS equipment that was fixed and back in service within 24 hours.

The GPS system, which cost nearly $11,000 a unit, was supposed to be finished three years ago but is still not done, auditors wrote. And the city plans to spend $4.3 million more on it, in part to help firefighters figure out the fastest routes to fires. Auditors asserted that most fire-truck drivers knew their way around unaided, but Mr. Gribbon said that they were routinely shifted to unfamiliar terrain and that firefighters still relied on paper “route cards” showing turn-by-turn directions to fire boxes.

The Sanitation Department, meanwhile, paid $3.7 million to outfit 48 trucks in Queens with customized location gear and 12 field supervisors with tablet computers to monitor them, using the city’s $500 million secure wireless network.

The devices sent useful real-time information on truck location and speed, as well as dashboard gauge data like oil pressure and battery voltage, even indicating whether the tailgate was open. Field supervisors driving in passenger cars received alerts whenever a trash truck arrived or left its route, or the driver’s lunch or coffee break went too long.

But locations were often off the mark, auditors found, when the system worked at all. “No trucks tracking!” a supervisor noted in December. “Some have not tracked since July!”

Sanitation supervisors complained that their tablets broke at least once a week and froze up or went blank even more often. They said they ignored many of the dashboard-type indicators and other functions entirely, raising “questions as to whether the features were really needed,” the auditors wrote.

Field supervisors also criticized the constant pinging of alerts from the devices about garbage trucks arriving at or leaving their routes and the like, calling it a distraction.

The department did not dispute many of the audit’s findings. Indeed, after snowstorms in December 2010, the Sanitation Department installed GPS-equipped cellphones in 2,425 trucks at a much lower cost.

But that created its own problems, auditors wrote: sanitation crews took to disconnecting the GPS tracking feature by switching the phones to “airplane mode.” And garbage haulers also discovered there was nothing preventing them from using the bolted-in cellphones to reach social-networking sites and even to receive photographs from private cellphones.

A version of this article appears in print on November 10, 2011, on Page A32 of the New York edition with the headline: GPS Units So Faulty, They Showed Fire Trucks in New York Harbor. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe